Sunday, March 22, 2009

No new cgi stuff this week, it was spring break and I decided to ease off on it a little so my heart could settle down. Instead I will present storyboards to my short film, "Scare-Horn in: One Hallow's Nightmare." It was a class project I took way back in 2005 when I decided to take an extra class in storyboarding with Robert Gibbs of Pixar fame. Robert was a teacher of mine in 1999 and I loved the class so much that I decided to take it again. I then came up with this storyboard as the class halloween project.

Rob had me change the ending (the original one had Scare-Horn the pumpkin-headed guy become a mall santa and the little girl "Belle-Jingles" visited him and stabbed him there). Instead the ending was changed to where he was plotting his next kill while celebrating Christmas at his house. I liked Rob's suggestion because it brought the story full circle, showing Belle-Jingles was no different than Scare-Horn as she too was a monster of her own holiday as well.

Soon I got a job working at Namco and while it's fun doing work for them, I still wanted to do animation based on my own creations. While working at Namco full-time, I cranked out this animation based on the storyboards in Flash at a rate of 1-2 hours per day at home. The whole animation took 6 months worth of homework to do altogether. This was released November 2006

The animation was met with open arms from colleagues and internet viewers. It was rated 4 1/2 out of 5 stars on You Tube. It has had over 5,880 views as of this writing and this was without hype or advertisement. To me, something like this, that is loved without hype from mainstream sponsors, is a far greater reward than someone giving me a blank statement of compliments. I was more proud of this work thank my last project, a Star Wars fan film spoof (which had far more elaborate and refined animation):

Never again will I do a fan film. For some reason I got more of a satisfaction showing my own creations. The whole experience taught me that doing art that is more of an extension of yourself, rather than doing one of someone else's creation is a far more satisfying experience for me at least.